Time Magazine's Man Of The Year!

We live in interesting times. Talk about the NBA is consumed by a referee who was working with the mob to influence betting on games. Because of Michael Vick we all know more about the world of dogfighting than we ever wanted. And baseball's long steroid era will reach its peak (or nadir, depending on your point of view) when Barry Bonds hits three more home runs.

But the redheaded stepchild of the American sports world, the NHL, has been left out of the fun. Frankly, it would take Gary Bettman taking out the league's offices in a Columbine-esque killing spree to generate any publicity for the beleagured warriors of the ice. Do we give points for effort, though?

Carolina Hurricanes center Eric Staal was one of 14 people arrested in Cook County, Minn., early Saturday morning and charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process. One of his three younger brothers was also arrested.

Staal's brother Jordan, who plays for the Penguins, was the sibling arrested at his older brother's bachelor party at a resort. He's only 18 so he was also charged for underage drinking. The group was repeatedly asked to stop being so loud and boisterous before finally being asked to vacate the premises. They took the party to the side of a highway where they yelled at passing cars before the cops interceded and broke up all the fun.

Worry not, though, if you're someone who has had it up to hear with athletes getting in trouble. All of the charges are misdemeanors because this amounts to breaking up a college party that barely spilled out of control. It's not that big a deal. Hell, even Scott Olsen of the Marlins, acting alone, managed to get tasered after leading police on a drunken car chase. You're trying, NHL, and we appreciate it but let's go for bigger ticket criminality in the future.

This Friday the long-awaited Simpsons Movie hits theaters. The show has had many sports associations, most notably the Homer at the Bat episode featuring a fistful of major leaguers, and cameos from a varied group that includes Joe Frazier, Chick Hearn, Gerry Cooney and Yao Ming. Hell, they've even referenced Esteban Yan. What they've never had, until now, is a live-action cast for a Simpsons movie made up exclusively of sports figures.

Homer Simpson – Ralph Friedgen. We were having trouble casting this most important of roles as it takes girth, a sense of adventure and a lack of regard/intelligence for the consequences. Friedgen is a big fat guy with little remaining hair but that’s not unique in sports. He got the role because he’s also a bit of a dummy. Take a look this story from today’s Baltimore Sun about a fishing trip Friedgen went on with his brothers after their charter canceled thanks to the weather.

One brother-in-law drove the boat onto an oyster bed. Friedgen was in the back of the boat. The tide was going down quickly. Friedgen realized that if they were going to get off the oyster bed, he had to jump off the boat. They pushed it off, but Friedgen got stuck about waist-deep in something akin to quicksand. With a current threatening to take him out to sea, he was able to get back into the boat. However, Friedgen was bleeding from a multitude of cuts.

When Friedgen got caught in quicksand, I imagine he bent down to pull one foot out and then the other one. That’s the kind of dedication to a part we’re looking for here.

Marge Simpson – Brynn Cameron. While Homer goes off on his crazy adventures Marge is forced to stay at home with the kids. Substitute Matt Leinart for Homer and you’ll see why Cameron wins this coveted part.

Bart Simpson – Gary Sheffield. His rebelliousness and unwillingness to follow the party line gets him in hot water with authority figures. Those traits have him perceived by the world at large as not being very bright. Underneath it all though there’s a bit of wisdom in what he says and he’s just doing what he feels because he’s not interested in what society says about him as long as they are paying attention to him.

Lisa Simpson – Billie Jean King. Overly concerned with social causes and won’t stop bugging people so that they pay attention to those causes because no one pays attention to her for just being the talented girl that she is. Also, Billie Jean King has an imaginary friend named Rachel Cohen who just got into Brandeis.

Maggie Simpson – Curt Schilling. In a gender-bending role the world finally gets to hear nothing from the mouth of Curt Schilling.

Ian Snell will have more time on his hands to kiss random blonds at bars in Seattle since he won't be making his scheduled start Tuesday night. It's not a sore elbow or tendonitis that will keep Snell from his appointed rounds but a chicken breast. Snell, the Pirates ERA leader, will be out of the lineup after burning his finger while preparing some poultry to top a salad. It's not that serious, he'll start Saturday in Anaheim instead, and the biggest casualty seems to have been Snell's dinner. "I'm all right, but the salad wasn't too good," he reported.

Strangely Snell isn't the first NL Central hurler to run into trouble with a salad. Matt Wise, a reliever with the Brewers, cut his finger on a pair of salad tongs last year and was forced to miss a few games while he recovered. Of course Wise also slammed his head into a dugout overhang this weekend after leaving a game so maybe he's just a klutz and we shouldn't go around blaming salad for keeping our nation's fine athletes from doing their jobs.

Snell's injury got us thinking about some of the stranger injuries that have cost pro athletes time on the field. Our personal favorites are Glenallen Hill's nightmarish nightmare and Charlie Hudson's firearm mishap. Hill suffers from arachnophobia and had a nightmare about spiders that landed him on the DL while he was with Toronto. He sleepwalked his way into a glass table and down a flight of stairs causing lacerations all over his body and, we're assuming, a difficult time when he returned to the clubhouse to face his teammates.

Hudson's might be even stranger. A lefty knuckleballer with the Texas Rangers in their infancy, once shot himself in the finger while cleaning a .38 revolver. Mike Shropshire's excellent Seasons In Hell about those teams has the story.

"It's just one of those accidents that hunters and gun enthusiasts have from time to time," Charlie explained while showing off his bandage. "I was cleaning my .38 revolver and the thing went off." Nobody bothered to ask Charlie exactly what type creatures he liked to hunt with a .38 revolver just as nobody questioned the wisdom, whether intentional or not, of his accident.

Former hockey goaltender Glenn Healy is also an accomplished bagpiper. He's not an accomplished bagpipe technician, however, and once suffered a deep gash on his hand while changing the bag on his pipes.

Monday's post on the worst sports owners in history garnered a lot of response from Feed readers so we'll spend a little time looking at their suggestions of people who were either left off the list or weren't given enough shit for their misdeeds in the owner's box.

Art Modell - There were myriad reasons given to despise Modell, from the firing of Paul Brown to the theft of the Browns to those annoying "Gotta go to Mo's" commercials. Not so much on that last one, actually, that's just my own vote. He made (dis)honorable mention on my initial post because of the move to Baltimore but readers enlightened me to some of his other lowlights. He ran off Paul Brown and Jim Brown, although sources seem to point to the latter as the reason for getting rid of the former. Two wrongs don't make a right, obviously, and his financial mismanagement, according to commenter Iff, meant he needed to overspend "on a loan to get a player whose girlfriend burned his house down." Bad Moon Rison, for those who can't keep up, is certainly not a player who was so good that you should jeopardize your franchise to acquire him. Cleveland has suffered a lot with Modell, Stepien and the Indian cabal.

Jeremy Jacobs - The owner of the Bruins probably rates below Wirtz and Ballard on the hockey wall of shame but his skinflint ways deserved mention in the original post. Like those other two owners (and Jim Dolan) he's taken an Original Six NHL club and turned them into just another franchise. The hardest moment for Bruin fans has to be that when Ray Bourque finally lifted the cup it was in Colorado because Jacobs never spent enough to surround him with a winning side.

Peter Angelos - There's no doubt that Oriole fans hate him with every fiber of their being. Hardly a good owner, Angelos has, at times, invested some money into the team. The Miguel Tejada signing, the veteran-heavy contenders of the mid-90's and this past offseason's bullpen spending spree all make me wonder if his biggest flaw hasn't been the people he's put in charge of player personnel. He doesn't spend as much as the Sox or Yanks and could probably spend more but his flaws aren't as egregious as the others on this list. He should have been in the discussion, though.

Daniel Snyder - This may be a controversial position but I don't think Snyder's all that bad as an owner. He's a pretty odious guy and starting the trend of charging to watch training camp is a fan unfriendly move that no one should've gotten behind, to be sure, but he clearly wants to win and he's willing to spend every dime he has to get there. If anything Snyder resembles the early Big Stein days, too involved and too much micromanagement, but I wonder if Steve Spurrier or Joe Gibbs had worked out how much animosity people would have had with him. He just needs his Joe Torre, in other words.

The Nuttings/Kevin McClatchey - Don't spend any money and when they do it's in a misguided way leaving the Pirates as a perennial cellar-dweller. They have given GM Dave Littlefield too much rope to hang himself with and that's reason enough for them to make the (dis)honorable mention category.

David Glass - Hiring Dayton Moore showed that he's not totally inept and there are two schools of thought about how dire the financial straits were in Kansas City before he took over. He was definitely working at a disadvantage but this offseason and several strong drafts make me want to leave him on the "wait and see" side of the ledger. The Royals were junk when he took over and he can only bear so much of the responsibility for that.

A couple of other writers added local suggestions. Seth from the Seattlest throws former Mariner owner George Argyros, Seahawk owner Ken Behring and Howard Schultz of Starbucks and the Sonics into the mix. All three have either tried or been the impetus for their team to find a home outside of Seattle. Schultz ranks lowest of the three, to me, for destroying the Sonics and leading to their eventual move out of town. Selling them to a guy who the city couldn't support didn't help at all, either.

• Roy Hofheinz: Got the majors to Houston and the Astrodome built, but alienated and/or bullied about a million people and never let the baseball people take care of baseball,

• John McMullen: Decided Nolan Ryan was too old for the Astros and fans were pretty much superfluous,

• Bud Adams: We'll never forgive him for making them tear down the exploding scoreboard in the Astrodome for extra seats – and then bailing out for Tennessee,

• Bob Short: Brought the American League to DFW – with one of the worst teams in history – and never knew when to quit meddling,

• Bum Bright: Speaking of running a team into the ditch ...

• Eddie Chiles: The inspiration for parodies of Texas oilmen everywhere, Chiles ran the Rangers like his oil wells -- deep into the ground.

Thanks to everyone who chimed in. I think the most enlightening part of the whole process has been learning just how many awful sports owners there have been in history. You could make a top 100 list and still leave off some worthy members of admission to this Hall of Shame.

Bryan Colangelo won the NBA Executive of the Year Award today, following in his father's footsteps and continuing the NBA's dogged persistence in giving awards to teams that get bounced from the playoffs in the first round. That got me thinking about some of the worst men to occupy front offices in the history of sports. It's a delicate game because you have hands-off owners done in by shoddy personnel men and corporate owners who don't give a thought to anything beyond the balance sheet as well as micromanagers who use their cunning to run teams directly into the ground. The list you'll see below is heavier on the latter side, it's much more difficult to blame corporate governors for doing their jobs than it is to find fault with owners who use their positions to burnish their own pockets and fame. Leave your thoughts about who's being judged too harshly, though it's hard to imagine there are many who don't deserve scorn on this list, and who we may be giving too easy a pass.

Morgan Ensberg is a mass of contradictions. He has the name of a Jewish sorority girl but is a Christian male baseball player and he bats righty but leans left politically. (Can't Stop The Bleeding)

Are you sitting down? Good. Kevin Durant's heading to the NBA. (USA Today)

Warren Moon was a master of the Run and Shoot. He's not so good at the Drink and Drive. (With Leather)

Doc Rivers and Danny Ainge join Isiah Thomas as further proof that those who play the game can't always coach or general manage it. But they can earn unwarranted contract extensions. Atlantic Division basketball: Catch the Fever! (Rumors and Rants)

Hockey predictions by a bona fide Canadian, so you know they're on the money. My money's still on the Whalers. (Out Of Left Field)

For anyone wondering what my performance would be like in a hockey fight, just imagine me as Todd Fedoruk of the Philadelphia Flyers and Colton Orr of the Rangers remains himself. Fedoruk lived, albeit with a concussion, wheras that might be all she wrote for your faithful blogger.

They've got some good eyes over at Sports By Brooks, probably because they regularly use them to check out hot broads. Not averse to using sex to sell anything, they are quick to call bullshit on those who cast aspersions at those who do it as well. Steve Hofstetter, a writer from SI.com, castigates the Los Angeles Kings for putting up billboards that feature an attractive young filly in a Kings jersey around L.A. He says they are missing the point by featuring good looking women in their ad campaign, since what they really need is a top-notch first-line center or some such nonsense.

He put this story up on SI.com on Monday, hours before the first pictures of the cover of the single biggest selling issue of Sports Illustrated began hitting the masses. The Pro Bowl wrapup issue? Nah. A Spring Training primer? Try again. It is, of course, the Swimsuit Issue which uses something totally and completely unrelated to sports (I suppose that swimsuits are indeed used for swimming competitions, sue me for exaggerating) to sell a magazine that's supposed to be about sports. See Marisa Miller, pictured above? She's currently featured in your esteemed magazine instead of Dwayne Wade or Greg Oden or Tiger Woods. Sadly Rick Reilly is still around but you get the picture.

And lest you think it's just the ink stained wretches who are using large breasted ladies as stand-ins for actual sports reporting, this is Jenn Sterger. SI.com's On Campus section is currently employing her in a series of video travelogues about college campuses (see her make the Shocker sign at Wichita State here and giggle like a 9-year old) something she's as well suited for as any girl familiar with the sensation of a finger penetrating her anus. Look, I've got no problem with using sexy women as stand-ins for substantive journalism or factual advertising. Bring it on says I, in fact. Just don't bitch and moan about it when you work for a company that does the exact same thing.